Cardstack Updates

If you missed Chris’ talk at the Hyperledger Member Summit, don’t worry! We have consolidated it into one video, where Chris walks you through the architecture and demos of blockchain-based registries. Come and learn how you can build the next enterprise blockchain use case using Git, Sawtooth, and Cardstack technology! https://youtu.be/HBqSpYpqWko

Here’s our July update to bring you up to speed on our recent developments, in case you missed some of our previous announcements. https://medium.com/cardstack/whats-new-at-cardstack-e83c5418acfe

Next week, we will launch Tally, a metering and billing network for purchasing Software-as-a-Service in a decentralized way.

If you’re interested in the CARD Protocol, read the lightly edited transcript of Chris’s recent tech talk. With links to individual sections of the video, it will help you understand this rather complex multi-currency payment & billing network that makes the Cardstack Ecosystem worthwhile for all participants. https://medium.com/cardstack/the-card-protocol-explained-c78e8e091a72

Developers attention please! Come and check out our first tutorial on how to build a movie tracking application using the Cardstack Framework. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a live application where you can add movies to track without needing to write additional code: https://docs.cardstack.com/release/developer-cookbook/movielist-tutorial/

This week, the Hyperledger team visited us at our office in One World Trade Center. On July 30, Chris will be at the Hyperledger Member Summit 2019 in Tokyo, where he was invited to give a talk in the "Exciting Developments" category. The topic: "Building a Media Registry with Git and Sawtooth.” We look forward to sharing what we have been working on with the members of the Hyperledger community. https://hyperledgermemberssummit2019.sched.com/event/QQ8v/building-a-media-registry-with-git-and-sawtooth-chris-tse-cardstack

The Cardstack quick start is here! Let our engineer Jen Weber walk you through building cards using the Card SDK. Watch as Jen clones an existing project (Card Board) to create a new one—and try it out yourself. You can add cards, configure them, style them, and finally view them in action. https://youtu.be/_iYu1rJujFk

What have our developers been up to? Ed is working at the framework level to refactor the Card SDK, which is being enhanced to support workflows with multiple participants. We want to make sure cards can truly move between different workflows, different sites, different hosts, and different hubs. Jen is concentrating on the quick start to building cards using this software development kit. Meanwhile, Hassan and Alex focus on the Cardstack Protocol, while Derrick, Will, and Burcu are working on a library of reusable UI components (for Card Folio / Tally), with the aim to provide an accessible UI that allows end users to tap into our capabilities.

Introducing the different types of card makers! Listen to Chris’ new tech talk, where he explains it all in detail: Who are the card makers? Which skills do they need? How many do we need for a rich ecosystem? And at which stage do they get involved? The “inverse pyramid model” presents them all—from the framework and product team to the back-end and front-end engineers, plus the Web developers and the power users. https://youtu.be/zrGLmAYYpqQ

Our current server will become read-only, but joining the new one is easy—just click on this link: https://discord.gg/Vw3Eyjv. See you on the other side!

Join our brand-new, official Cardstack Discord channel! We’re switching Discord servers in an effort to consolidate and boost the communication between our team and our community. You can read the full announcement here: https://medium.com/cardstack/the-brand-new-official-cardstack-discord-channel-4a2ffd925cee

Coming up: Who are the card makers? Watch out for Chris’ next tech talk, where he explains in detail how the different types of card makers can contribute to the Cardstack ecosystem.

Last week, Chris met with the team from EOS New York. They discussed how the Cardstack Framework and the Card Board codebase can serve as the foundation of a new community system, which can scale using the EOSIO software. We look forward to future talks and collaboration!

Learn all about the CARD Protocol, our multi-currency payment & billing network! Chris explains how this economic layer makes the Cardstack ecosystem worthwhile for everyone involved—talking about the technical mechanics behind it and the relationships between the main participants (from customers using a prepaid card to service providers and retailers). Find out how exchange rates, token pools, and smart contracts factor into this, and hear which role Tally, Card Folio, CLUTCH, and the Cardstack Hub play in this system. https://youtu.be/FwO_ZGCk410

This is the beginning of a series of articles and videos, where we present new cards and features that will gradually be added to the Card Catalog. In this first piece, we talk about the many reasons why publishing needs to be decentralized, to give creators control over their own creations back. Our first step towards achieving that goal is called “Card Board”—our already open-sourced content management system, which developers can add to and storytellers can use to become their own publishers! https://medium.com/cardstack/we-need-to-decentralize-publishing-again-7828be8c067b

Our newest video update is all about the Cardstack product! Cardstack sits at the core of a four-sided market between users, developers, service providers, and businesses, aiming to be a catalyst for Web 3.0. Chris sheds light on the essential components of our product—the Card SDK, the CARD Protocol, and the Cardstack Hub—explaining how they are connected to ensure a fair, usable, and sustainable decentralized network. https://youtu.be/3AmjAvQGSYw

The Card Catalog is a collection of default cards that come with the Card SDK. As an application creator, you can build a simple hosted application using these core cards—which include a Content Card, a Wallet Card, a Message Card, and many more. Just to remind you: A full application is made up of several individual cards. Each card is a configurable, functional unit that can be easily reused and cross-referenced on the internet.

How do you write code that writes code? Check out Jen Weber’s newest video, where she shows you how to improve your programming skills with popular JavaScript tools and apply them to the Cardstack codebase. https://youtu.be/hCp8NxNA7yU

In developers’ eyes, Cardstack is an open-source software development kit (SDK) that enables them to build full-stack applications efficiently—to bring software to the users in the form of cards. Based on those cards, the users create their own cards for their digital presence, which they collect in My Cards. In their eyes, Cardstack is an application environment built on top of cards. But they need someone else to run their cards for them as a service. That’s why the blockchain sees Cardstack as a provider of tokenized software as a service (SaaS), distributing revenue fairly to all contributors across the network. By paying the service provider, the user helps generate revenue, a portion of which goes to the developers who provided the software (the tools, the cards, the plugins) in the first place. Thus, while Cardstack offers different opportunities and benefits to different audiences—the developers, the users, the blockchains—they are all deeply connected to make this system work.

Here’s an in-depth article to go with our video presentation and demo of the dotBC media registry—which is based on song data from Warner Music Group and Warner/Chappell music. Chris explains what it takes to build a high-quality, decentralized music metadata management system and how the Cardstack Framework made it possible. He gives an overview of the concepts and architecture behind the registry, plus ways in which it can be used. https://medium.com/cardstack/building-decentralized-media-registries-a953fd36d3d4